Malus Domestica (46 page)

There was a faint bruise in the corner of Kenway’s mouth, as if he’d wiped at it with dirty hands. “Your dad’s got a hell of a haymaker, too. Can’t hate a guy that can throw a punch worth a damn at a guy with fifty or sixty pounds on him.”

❂

Robin spent the afternoon editing footage, sitting in the cupola with Kenway and Wayne while they riddled each other with bullets in
Halo.
Heinrich had convinced her not to upload any more video since they were aware that Karen Weaver watched them, and he didn’t want to advertise their plans. “That’s how a lot of units got their asses kicked in the Civil War,” he told them. “Their tactics and plans got published in the newspapers.
114
^th
So-and-so Regiment Marching to Antietam Monday.
Stuff like that. Loose lips sink ships.”

“I’ll save it up and make a feature-length entry out of it next weekend, then,” she said.

“Assuming we make it to next weekend.”

“Ye of little faith.”

Around four, Kenway went down to prepare the steaks. He covered both sides in a layer of sea-salt and seasonings, then lay them on plates in the fridge to rest. “The salt breaks down the proteins and draws out the water. The seasonings take the water’s place in the meat. You let it sit for an hour or two, then take it out, rinse off the salt, pat it dry, and there you go—dry-aged steak, just like you’d get in a fancy restaurant.”

“How’d you get so good at cooking?” asked Leon. “I thought you were in the Army. Were you a cook?”

“No. I was stationed with an Italian unit. Every weekend, or every other weekend, we would buy some cheap steaks off the civilian dining-facility contractors in Camp Stone and grill them on this big piece of wire mesh laid across stacks of cinder blocks. This Italian fella Sergeant Querini showed me how to salt a steak to dry-age it.”

As six o’clock drew nearer and nearer, the house seemed to tighten around them. Wayne could feel the clock ticking like a man on the morning of his execution, a slow dreadful stretching of time. Nothing on TV could hold his attention for long, and a book was out of the question. All he could focus on was the mission-house at the top of the hill.

“I want to go with you,” he finally told Robin, tearing his gaze away. The two of them were playing
Halo
against Kenway, and they were losing because Wayne kept staring out the window.

“Go where?” She jumped into a jeep and tore across a virtual landscape. “With me and Heinrich?”

“Yeah.”

“Nooooo.
Even if the witches didn’t expect you at dinner, your dad would never agree to that.”

Kenway came out of nowhere on a flying purple jet-thing, slamming into Robin’s jeep and flipping it over. She fell out of it and lobbed plasma grenades at him, but he was already too high, corkscrewing through the sky. “What do you mean, ‘me and Heinrich’?” he asked, firing blasts of energy. “I’m going too. We agreed: I’m your sidekick now.”

She sighed, running into a cave, dirt pluming up behind her from his volley of gunfire. A rocket-launcher lay on the cave floor. “That I did. But I need you outside, watching the house. You’re my lookout.”

“Lookout?” He crammed the Banshee jet into the cave opening and ejected from the back, trapping her inside.

“Yeah. We’ll plug hands-free earbuds into our cellphones and use them as tactical radios. I bought a couple of em this morning.” She blew the jet to pieces with a rocket, loaded another, and came charging out, firing at Kenway. He sprayed her with a hail of rifle bullets, but the rocket hit the ground at his feet and blasted him into the air. “You take up position outside the garden wall where you can see through the dining room windows.”

Kenway’s soldier tumbled against a boulder and collapsed in a lifeless heap. He materialized on the other side of the area behind a massive stone monolith, standing next to another jeep. He snatched up a nearby rifle and took off, driving through a grove of trees.

“I’m assuming all three of them are going to be at dinner, and the fourth will stay upstairs as usual,” said Robin, trading the empty rocket launcher for the rifle off of Kenway’s body. “As far as I know, she’s bedridden. Or disfigured.”

“Or maybe they keep her up there to keep her safe.” Wayne came trundling over the hill in a tank, driving down into a valley as Robin came along.

“Or that.”

Pride lifted the corner of Wayne’s lips in a crooked smile.

“If you see any of the other three behave strangely, as if they’re aware I’m in there, or if you see them head upstairs, I want you to alert me.” The jeep burst out of the foliage at the top of the river bed, heading straight for Robin’s face.

Wayne fired a tank shell into the jeep’s passenger side, exploding it in midair, and the flaming vehicle sailed over her head. Kenway’s armored corpse flopped into the brook at Robin’s feet in a shower of discarded weapons and grenades.

He elbowed Wayne in the ribs, grinning for the first time since they’d met. “All right now, kid…you’re gonna make me go into Beast Mode here.” Kenway leaned forward in concentration, sitting on the edge of the bed.

Climbing out of the tank, Wayne switched to his sniper rifle and ran away, throwing a grenade underneath. He was already crouching at the top of the river bed looking through his scope at Kenway when the tank exploded.

“Bring it, old man.”

25

A
COUPLE
OF
HOURS
later (without his cell Joel couldn’t tell, as though constant access to his iPhone had damaged his perception of time), the two brothers wedged the final kennel into place.

Surprisingly, all but three of the cages fit in the back of the truck. Euchiss took two of them and put them in the cab up front. Bowker urged Joel and Fisher into the cargo hold with the cats and pulled the rolldown shut on them.

The air stank of cat piss and the space they were confined to was only the last couple of feet of the compartment, a gap two feet wide, nine feet tall, and seven feet across. Joel sat down and listened to the officer put a padlock through the handle…which was a feat in itself, because the darkness was a near-unbearable chaos of agonized groaning and keening.

He leaned back against the wall and rubbed his face in exasperation and fear. The cats were too loud to talk to Fisher, so he just closed his eyes and tried to think of a way out of this mess.

Prayers seemed trite and useless. Joel thought of himself peripherally as a Christian, but he hadn’t been to church since he was a teenager and was always at a loss for words when someone asked him to say Grace over dinner.

It was no different today as he rode blind and disoriented back into the hustle and bustle of urban Blackfield, but the irony was not lost on him that if he’d gone to church that morning, he probably wouldn’t be in this mess. Who thinks to look for a fugitive in church?

Once he’d exhausted his reserve of plans and mental preparations—daydreaming about leaping out at Euchiss when he opened the back of the truck, usually getting shot or Tasered for his troubles—he played around with the reasons for why Fisher’s cat had killed itself, turning the scene over and over in his mind like a Rubik’s Cube. The way the cat had hunkered down and stared at Joel as if he were a piece of string or a laser-dot…the fixed stare of a predator watching for movement, sizing up a target.

The truck drove a shorter route than the one they’d taken in the police cruiser, but more circuitous. He counted at least seven stops, four of which were at traffic lights (this was determined by the fact that the driver only made a cursory effort to stop at stop-signs). The animals never stopped yowling; if anything, it only got worse and worse, increasing whenever the truck paused and the engine quieted.

The Tylenol was wearing off, and his leg radiated heat through the bandage, throbbing and aching like a live wire under fabric.

He had actually started to doze off when the truck’s horn blared. An engine somewhere off to their port side revved, rising in volume, and then,
WHAM!,
an incredible force slammed into them, throwing Joel onto his hands and knees at Fisher’s feet.

Someone had side-swiped them. The tires barked a squealing tremolo
, EEEEE-E-E-E-E!
Dozens of wire kennels toppled over in a riot of metal and screaming animals.

“Who the hell!” shouted Bowker, his voice almost obscured by the cats. The offending vehicle crashed into them again, partially caving in the wall and knocking down cages. A dozen lasers of daylight streamed in through pinholes bashed into the side of the cargo compartment. Joel scrambled into Fisher’s reach and the man dragged his brother into his lap, clutching his head in powerful arms.

For a few seconds, Fish’s cologne overpowered the cat-stink.
If I live through this I’ll never bitch about keto again.

A shadow loomed at them from the fast lane, blocking out the light, and beat against the truck
—BAM.
This time their mystery assailant pressed against the truck’s flank, trying to fishtail them. The sound of their engine reverberated through the wall, bogging down, straining.

Bowker managed to keep it more or less on the straight and narrow, but some sort of structure collided with the right side and scraped endlessly down the fender like rolling thunder, drumming at regular intervals, a giant metal heart,
boom-boom,
boom-boom.

A guard-rail.

As soon as Joel placed the sound, a tremendous noise—a great shuddering
BOOM
like the world tearing in half—told him that the truck had broken through, and the entire cargo compartment capsized to the right. Joel and Fisher and a hundred and forty-two cats slammed into the starboard wall and free-floated for about two and a half seconds.

Instead of crashing into water like he’d anticipated, the truck piledrived itself into solid ground.

Forward momentum threw every cage into the front of the compartment and tore the brothers away from each other. Joel cartwheeled backward into the pile of kennels, bounced and fell on top of Fisher. The ceiling sheared open with the furious, ear-destroying roar of a hundred thousand dragons.

❂

Blood dripped on the back of his head, an insistent
tap, tap, tap.
Joel opened his eyes to find himself lying on top of his brother, his face pressed against Fisher’s chest, listening to a chorus of tuneless, defeated howling. He was pinned under a tangle of cages. Dead, dying, and injured house-cats lay in slumped piles of hair all around him, suspended in a masterwork of bent wires.

Fish groaned. “What happened?”

“We crashed.”

A familiar chemical smell tainted the air, overpowering the cat urine. Gasoline. Diesel. The fuel tank had ruptured. “We gotta get out of here,” said Fish, and he tried to stir. Sharp pain needled Joel’s left shoulder.

“Oww, fuck.
Quit movin.”

Fish relaxed. Joel tried to push himself up, but the cages were too heavy. A cat’s paw groped at his face.

He shivered as a surge of adrenaline ripped through his core, his heart flaring, and he tried to push again. This time the cage against his back snapped, and a wire bar twanged like a broken guitar string, scratching his side.

“Hold on!” someone shouted from up the bank, feet thumping through dry leaves. “I’m comin! Hold on!”

Joel gazed through a galaxy of aluminum wires. The back door was smashed open, and he could see the bridge they’d fallen from, and the guardrail they’d smashed through.

A Frontier pickup was parked on the shoulder. Ashe Armstrong ran sideways down the slope in an awkward loping gallop. The big veterinarian took hold of the roof where it’d been peeled away and hauled on it, tearing it open further. “Hey,” he called over the howling of the cats, spotting Joel through the twisted bars. “I’ll get you guys out. Hold on.”

He worked his way down the side, wrenching it down, filling the box with sunlight. Joel called out, “I’m holdin, man, I’m holdin.”

Reaching into the cargo compartment, Ashe started grabbing at kennels and dragging them out onto the bank. The cats inside them complained, but right now his first priority was freeing Joel and Fish.

Fisher coughed in Joel’s ear. “You all right?”

“Yeah.” Joel winced. “Got a wire jabbin me in my back and I got one foot in Hell, but otherwise, I’m aight. You?”

“You had your tetanus shot, right?”

“No, but it looks like I’m gonna need one.”

“How did you find us?” Fish asked Ashe. “Was that you that made the cop crash?”

“Followed you guys all the way to Glen Addie, but I lost you at a red light.” Pulling on a cage, Ashe lifted it over his head and flung it into the weeds. The cat inside was already dead, flopping around limp and shapeless. “I was driving around the 1800 block, thinking of checking the animal shelter—since it was the only thing out that way that made any sense—when I saw those two cops and followed em.”

The next cage was stuck fast and the cat inside, a black shorthair with white patches, yowled pitifully. Ashe pulled and pulled until it let go with a
twang
and he set it aside. “I don’t know why I rammed the truck,” he said, grabbing another one. “It seemed like the thing to do. Those guys are shady as hell and I figured you were in the back.”

“It’s a good thing you did,” said Joel.

“Figured they were gonna try to finish the job they started last night. Take you somewhere and kill you. Guess it seemed safer to run the truck off the road and pull you out than try to stop em and get myself shot like they shot you.”

“I’m glad you believed me.”

“It’s hard to disbelieve a gunshot wound to the leg.”

Fisher coughed again. “Come on, man, hurry up. We need to get out of here.” The smell of diesel fuel was growing stronger. “Those two cops. Are they out? Are they out there?”

Ashe shook his head. “I ain’t seen em. Looks like they’re still in the front.”

Bracing himself against the wall of the compartment, Joel did a pushup and found that the load on his back was considerably lighter, affording him a few inches of wiggle-room.

“Almost there,” said Ashe. He laced his fingers through another kennel and paused.